Michael Dirda recommends Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. I’ll have to read it because thinking on paper is what I like to do.
I’m a keeper of notebooks. I found one recently I kept in college. On the first page were two quotations from Eric Hoffer:
That which is unique and worthwhile in us makes itself felt only in flashes. If we do not know how to catch and savor these flashes, we are without growth and without exhilaration.
Hoffer captured those flashes on notecards and in pocket notebooks. Then he rewrote his notes, over and again. It was a digestive process. He compared it to a cow chewing her cud. Slowly, the grass becomes cow, and not the other way around, he said.
If that sounds like work, it might be. But here’s Hoffer again:
But I remember how that day I got started on a beautiful train of thought ….
Those flashes, those flights of thought, are hard to beat.
• Michael Dirda, “The surprising history of the humble notebook”; The Washington Post, Oct. 4, 2024. It’s here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/10/04/notebook-history-roland-allen-review/
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